Beware of the Trains Read Free Page B

trick.” He yawned prodigiously, and gazed out of the car window. ‘Do you know, I believe it’s the dawn… Next time I want to arrive anywhere, I shall travel by bus.”

Humbleby Agonistes
    “In my job,” said Detective-Inspector Humbleby, “a man expects to be shot at every now and again. It’s an occupational risk, like pneumoconiosis in coal-mining, and when you’re on duty you’ve obviously got to be prepared for it to crop up. But a social call on an old acquaintance is quite a different matter. Here am I on my Sabbatical. I drop in to see this man I’ve known ever since the 1914 war. And what happens? Before I have a chance to as much as open my mouth and ask him how he is, he snatches a damned great revolver out of his pocket and lets it off at me. Well, I was petrified. Anyone would be. I was so astonished I literally couldn’t move.”
    “He doesn’t seem to have hit you, though.” From the depths of the armchair in his rooms at St. Christopher’s, Gervase Fen, University Professor of English Language and Literature, regarded his guest with a clinical air. “l see no wound,” he elaborated.
    “There is no wound. Three times he fired,” said Humbleby dramatically, “and three times he missed. Which, of course, makes it all the odder.”
    “Why ‘of course’? I’ve always understood that revolvers—”
    “I say ‘of course’ because Garstin-Walsh, whom I’m speaking of, is a retired Army man: a brevet-rank Colonel, to be precise … Yes, I know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me that Army men seldom actually use revolvers, even though they may carry them; and that consequently it’s naïve to expect them to be good marksmen. Agreed. But the trouble in this instance is that Garstin-Walsh has always made a hobby of shooting in general—he’s the sort of man it’s impossible to visualise outside the context of dogs and guns and an interest in dahlias—and of pistol-shooting in particular. That`s why I’m so certain he missed me on purpose: at a yard’s range even I could hardly go wrong… But perhaps I’d better begin at the beginning.”
    Fen nodded gravely. “Perhaps you had.”
    “As you know,” said Humbleby, “I was in Military Intelligence during the 1914 war; and it was while I was investigating an unimaginative piece of sabotage at an arms depot near Loos that I first met Garstin·Walsh, who at that time was a Captain in the Supply Corps. It’d be an exaggeration to say that we became close friends—and looking back on it, I can’t quite see why we should have become friends at all, because our temperaments weren’t at all alike, and we had very few interests in common. Still, for some obscure reason we did in fact get on well together; and I think that much of his attraction for me must have been due to his complete humourlessness—we were all a bit hysterical in those days, whether we knew it or not, and a man who never laughed was unexpectedly restful.”
    “We used to meet, then, as often as we could; and after the Armistice we kept up a sporadic correspondence and managed some sort of reunion once or twice every year. Then eighteen months ago Garstin-Walsh retired and went to live at a village called Uscombe, which is a few miles from Exeter; and since I was staying with my sister at Exmouth, and hadn’t seen him for some considerable time, I decided, the day before yesterday, to drive over and pay him a surprise visit.
    “I left Exmouth immediately after breakfast and got to Uscombe about ten-thirty. Uscombe’s not as cut off from the rest of the world as some Devon villages, because it’s only a quarter of a mile from the main London road; but in all other respects it’s fairly typical—settled to some extent by middle-class ‘foreigners,’ I mean, with an unsuccessful preparatory boarding-school in a tumble-down manor-house, and a church tower scheduled dangerous; you know the sort of place. I hadn’t been there before, so I